"Webbiquity" is about being everywhere online when and where buyers are looking for what you sell. It's what I help B2B clients achieve through a coordinated strategy of SEO, search marketing, social media, brand management, content marketing, and influencer relations, supported by the right marketing technology.

Like carpenters and cooks, SEO professionals rely on creativity, skill and the right tools to work their magic. And like a craftsman or chef, a talented SEO pro can produce impressive results even with simple tools—but can achieve even more with better, more specialized tools.

In this post you’ll find keyword tools, other SEO tools (backlink checkers, SEO analysis, duplicate content finders), and reviews of even more tools (from smart guys like Lee, Marty, Brent…hmm, why does there seem to be so much SEO talent in Minnesota? Must be something in the water…).

Marty Weintraub delivers a blog eulogy for Google’s free AdWords Keyword tool, which wasn’t killed so much as neutered in October 2010, and suggests four alternatives including WordStream. Fortunately, however, in response to massive and severe blowback from the search marketing and SEO communities, Google relented two months later and fixed the keyword tool.

A slick SEO toolbar that enables you to instantly check a variety of attributes on any web page including pagerank, delicious links, backlinks, keyword density and domain age. What’s really tight though is the ability to run Google searches and then export the results to Excel.

The creators didn’t waste a lot of time on a fancy UI, but URLinfo is a handy collection of 113 tools for, as the site puts it, “handling web pages: finding information about it, translating it, finding related pages, etc.” Find search engine backlinks, blog site references, social media links, Alexa info, and much more, though a few of the tools need updating.

Reviews of SEO Tools

Guest blogger Lee Odden quantifies the value of inbound links for SEO and then provides reviews of five tools “for tracking inbound links (that) small business marketers can use to get a leg up on the competition.”

Because “Working in SEO is very similar to working as a carpenter (why does that analogy sound familiar?), painter & decorator, builder, or a mechanic…you are only as good as the tools you have at your disposal. Bad tools lead to bad craftsmanship, and this will ultimately lead to poor conversion rates, wasted money, and unhappy clients,” James Brack reviews four valuable yet free tools for keyword research, competitive diagnostics and links building including Link Diagnosis and Link Hub Finder.

Rene LeMerle supplies mini-reviews of 10 competitive analysis tools to help discover “who is out ranking you and what they’re doing to achieve the results,” including Spyfu, SEMrush and Linkscape. The list is great, the site a bit spammy; apologies if you get an annoying popup when clicking the link, I wish bloggers would realize how annoying this is and how it cheapens the experience of visiting a site, but some still don’t get it.

Patrick Ahler supplies helpful, illustrated reviews of 10 SEO exensions for the Google Chrome browser including SEO Site Tools, IE Tab (allows you to view a web page as if you were using IE) and Google Screen Capture.

If the collection of tools above isn’t enough to keep you busy for a while, Garry Przyklenk provides brief reviews of another 20+ free SEO tools, toolbars and browser plugins, “freemium” and fee-based tools.